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THE 



JTOHMSON P^ETY. 



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From the Atlantic Monthly, September, 1866. 

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E. C, Markley <k Son, Printers, 442 Library Street, Phila. 



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THE JOHNSON PARTY. 

[From the " Athtntic 3foiithl^," Sept. 1806.] 

TuE President of the United States has so singular a combination of 
defects for the office of a constitutional magistrate, that he could have 
obtained the opportunity to misrule the nation only by a visitation of Provi- 
dence. Insincere as well as stubborn, cunning as well as unreasonable, 
vain as well as ill-tempered, greedy of popularity as well as arbitrary in 
disposition, veering in his mind as well as fixed in his will, he unites in his 
character the seemingly opposite qualities of a demagogue and autocrat, 
and converts the Pi'esidential chair into a stump or a throne, according as 
the impulse seizes him to cajole or to command. Doubtless much of the 
evil developed in him is dae to his misfortune in having been lifted by 
events to a position which he lacked the elevation and breadth of intelli- 
gence adequately to fill. He was cursed with the possession of a power 
and authority which no man of narrow mind, bitter prejudices, and inordi- 
nate self-estimation can exercise without depraving himself as well as injuring 
the nation. Egotistic to the point of mental disease, he resented the direct 
and manly opposition of statesmen to his opinions and moods as a personal 
affront, and descended to the last degree of littleness in a political leader, 
— that of betraying his party, in order to gratify his spite. He of course 
became the prey of intriguers and sycophants, — of persons who understand 
the art of managing minds Avhich are at once arbitrary and weak, by 
allowing them to retain unity of will amid the most palpable inconsisten- 
cies of opinion, so that inconstancy to principle shall not weaken force of 
puq)ose, nor the emphasis be at all abated with which they may bless to- 
day what yesterday they cursed. Thus the abhorrer of traitors has now 
become their tool. Thus the denouncer of Copperheads has now sunk into 
dependence on their support. Thus the imposer of conditions of recon- 
struction has now become the foremost friend of the unconditioned return 
of the Rebel States. Thus the furious Union Republican, whose harangues 
against his political opponents almost scared his political friends by their 
violence, has now become the shameless betrayer of the people who trusted 
him. And in all these changes of base he has appeared supremely con- 
scious, in his own mind, of playing an independent, a consistent, and 
especially a conscientious part. 

Indeed, Mr. Johnson's character would be imperfectly described if some 
attention were not paid to his conscience, the purity of which is a favorite 
subject of his own discourse, and the perversity of which is the wonder of 
the rest of mankind. As a public man, his real position is similar to that 
of a commander of an army, who should pass over to the ranks of the 
enemy he was commissioned to fight, and then plead his individual convic- 
tions of duty as a justification of his treachery. In truth, Mr. Johnson's 
conscience is like his understanding, a mere form of expression of his will. 
The will of ordinary men is addressed through their understanding and 

(1) 



2 THE JOHNSON PARTY. 

conscience. Mr. Johnson's understanding and conscience can be addressed 
only through his will. He puts intellectual principles and the moral law 
in the possessive case, thinks he pays them a compliment and adds to their 
authority when he makes them the adjuncts of his petted pronoun " my" ; 
and things to him are reasonable and right, not from any quality inherent 
in themselves, but because they are made so by his determinations. Indeed, 
he sees hardly anything as it is, but almost everything as colored by his 
own dominant egotism. Thus he is never weary of asserting that the 
people are on his side ; yet his method of learning the wishes of the people 
is to scrutinize his own, and, when acting out his own passionate impulses, 
he ever insists that he is obeying public sentiment. Of all the wilful men 
who, by strange chance, have found themselves at the head of a constitu- 
tional government, he most resembles the last Stuart king of England, 
James II ; and the likeness is increased from the circumstance that the 
American James has, in his supple and plausible Secretary of State, one 
fully competent to play the part of Sunderland. 

The party which, under the ironical designation of the National Union 
Party, now proposes to take the policy and character of Mr. Johnson under 
its charge, is composed chiefly of Democrats defeated at the polls, and Dem- 
ocrats defeated on the field of battle. The few apostate Republicans, who 
have joined its ranks while seeming to lead its organization, are of small 
account. Its great strength is in its Southern supporters, and, if it comers 
into power, it must obey a Rebel direction. By the ti'eachcry of the Pres- 
ident, it will have the executive patronage on its side, — for Mr. Johnson'? 
"conscience" is of that peculiar kind which finds satisfaction in arraying 
the interest of others against their convictions ; and having thus the powci 
to purchase support, it will not fail of those means of dividing the Nortt 
which come from corrupting it. The party under which the war for the 
Union was conducted is to be denounced and proscribed as the party of 
disunion, and we are to be edified by addresses on the indissoluble unity of 
the nation by Secessionists, who have hardly yet had time to wash from 
their hands the stains of Union blood. The leading proposition on which 
this conspiracy against the country is to be conducted is the monstrous ab- 
surdity, that the Rebel States have an inherent, " continuous," uncondi- 
tioned, constitutional right to form a part of the Federal government, when 
they have once acknowledged the fact of the defeat of their inhabitants in 
an armed attempt to overthrow and subvert it, — a proposition which im- 
plies that victory paralyzes the powers of the victors, that ruin begins when 
success is assured, that the only effect of beating a Southern Rebel in the 
field is to exalt him into a maker of laws for his antagonist. 

In the minority Report of the Congressional Joint Committee on Recon- 
struction, which is designed to supply the new party with constitutional 
law, this theory of State Rights is most elaborately presented. The 
ground is taken, that during the Rebellion the States in which it prevailed 
were as " completely competent States of the United States as they were 
before the Rebellion, and were bound by all the obligations which the Con- 
stitution imposed, and entitled to all its privileges;" and that the Rebellion 
consisted merely in a series of "illegal acts of the citizens of such States." 



TBE JOnNSON PARTY. 3 

On tbis theory it is dilTicult to liiul where the guilt of rebcUioa lies. The 
States are innocent because the Itebellion was a rising of individuals ; the 
individuals cannot be very criminal, for it is on their votes that the com- 
mittee chiefly rely to build up the National Union Party. Again, we an; 
informed that, in respect to the admission of representatives from " such 
States," Congress has no right or power to ask more than two questions. 
These arc : " Have these States organized governments ? Are these gov- 
ernments republican in form ? " The committee proceed to say : " How 
they were formed, under what auspices they were formed, are inquiries 
vath which Congress has no con.cern. The right of the people to form a 
government for themselves has never been questioned." On this principle, 
President Johnson's labors in organizing State governments were works 
of supererogation. At the close of active hostilities the Rebel States had 
organized, though disloyal, governments, as republican in form as they 
were before the war broke out. The only thing, therefore, they were re- 
quired to do was to send their Senators and Representatives to Washing- 
ton. Congress could not have rightfully refused to receive them, because 
all questions as to their being loyal or disloyal, and as to the changes which 
the war had wrought in the relations of the States they represented to the 
Union, were inquiries with which Congress had no concern I And here 
again we have the ever-recurring difBculty respecting the " individuals " 
who were alone guilty of the acts of rebellion. " The right of the people," 
we are assured, " to form a government for themselves, has never been 
questioned." But it happens that " the people " here indicated are the very 
individuals who were before pointed out as alone responsible for the Rebel- 
lion. In the exercise of their right " to form a goveriftiient for themselves," 
they rebelled ; and now, it seems, by the exercise of the same right, they 
can unconditionally return. There is no wrong anywhere : it is all " right." 
The people are first made criminals, in order to exculpate the States, and 
then the innocence of the States is used to exculpate the people. When 
we see such outrages on common sense gravely perpetrated by so eminent 
a lawyer as the one who drew up the committee's Report, one is almost 
inclined to define minds as of two kinds, the legal mind and the human 
mind, and to doubt if there is any possible connection in reason between 
the two. To the human mind it appears that the Federal government has 
spent thirty-five hundred millions of dollars, and sacrificed three hundred 
thousand lives, in a contest which the legal mind dissolves into a mere 
mist of unsubstantial phrases ; and by skill in the trick of substituting 
words for things, and definitions for events, the legal mind proceeds to show- 
that these words and definitions, though scrupulously shielded from any 
contact with realities, are sufficient to prevent the nation from taking or- 
dinary precautions against the recuiTcnoe of calamities fresh in its bitter 
experience. The phrase " State Rights," translated from legal into human 
language, is found to mean, the power to commit \ATongs on individuals 
whom States may desire to oppress, or the power to protect the inhabitants 
of States from the consequences of their own crimes. The minority of the 
committee, indeed, seem to have forgotten that there has hccn any real 
war, and bring to mind the converted Australian savage, whom the mis- 



4 THE JOHNSON PARTY. 

sionary could not make penitent for a murder committed the day before, 
because the trifling occurrence had altogether passed from his recollection. 

In fact, all attempts to discriminate between Rebelsjind Rebel States, to 
the advantage of the latter, are done in defiance of notorious facts. If the 
Rebellion had been merely a rising of individual citizens of States, it would 
have been an insurrection against the States, as well as against the Federal 
government, and might have been easily put down. In that case, there 
would have been no withdrawal of Southern Senators and Representatives 
from Congress, and therefore no question as to their inherent right to re- 
turn. In Missouri and Kentucky, for example, there was civil war, waged 
by inhabitants of those States against their local governments, as well as 
against the United States ; and nobody contends that the rights and privi- 
leges of those States were forfeited by the criminal acts of their citizens. 
But the real strength of the Rebellion consisted in this, that it was not a 
rebellion against States, but a rebellion hy States. No loose assemblage 
of individuals, though numbering hundreds of thousands, could long have 
resisted the pressure of the Federal power and the power of the State gov- 
ernments. They would have had no means of subsistence except those 
derived from plunder and voluntary contributions, and they would have 
lacked the military organization by which mol)s are transformed into for- 
midable armies. But the Rebellion being one of States, being vii'tually 
decreed by the people of States assembled in convention, was sustained by 
the two tremendous governmental powers of taxation and conscription. 
The willing and the unwilling were thus equally placed at the disposition 
of a strong government. The population and wealth of the whole immense 
region of country in which the Rebellion prevailed, were at the service of 
this government. So completely was it a rebellion of States, that the uni- 
versal excuse of the minority of original IJnion men for entering heartily 
into the contest after it had once begun was, that they thought it their 
duty to abide by the decision, and share the fortunes, of their respective 
States. Nobody at the South believed at the time the war commenced, or 
during its progress, that his State possessed any " continuous" right to a 
participation in the privileges of the Federal Constitution, the obligations 
of which it had repudiated. When confident of success, the Southerner 
scornfully scouted the mere suspicion of entertaining such a degrading no- 
tion ; when assured of defeat, his only thought was to " get his State back 
into the Union on the best terms that could bo made." The idea of " con- 
ditions of readmission " was as firmly fixed in the Southern as in the North- 
ern mind. If the politicians of the South now adopt the principle that the 
Rebel States have not, as States, ever altered their relations to the Union, 
they do it from policy, finding that its adoption will give them " better 
terms " than they ever dreamed of getting before the President of the 
United States taught them that it would be more politic to bully than to 
plead. 

In the last analysis, indeed, the theory of the minority of the Reconstruc- 
tion Committee reduces the Rebel States to mere abstractions. It is plain 
that a State, in the concrete, is constituted by that portion of the inhabitants 
who form its legal people ; and that, in passing back of its government and 



THE JOHNSON PARTY. 5 

constitution, we reach a convention of the legal people as its ultimate ex 
pression. By such conventions the acts of secession were passed ; and, as 
far as the people of the Rebel States could do it, they destroyed their 
States considered as organized communities forming a part of the United 
States. The claim of the United States to authority over the territory 
and inhabitants was of course not affected by these acts ; but in what con- 
dition did they place the people ? Plainly in the condition of rebels, en- 
gaged in an attempt to overturn the Constitution and government of the 
United States. As the whole force of the people in each of the Rebel com- 
munities was engaged in this work, the whole of the people were rebels 
and public enemies. Nothing was left, in each case, but an abstract State, 
without any external body, and as destitute of people having a right to 
enjoy the privileges of the Constitution as if the territory had been swept 
clean of population by a pestilence. It is, then, only this abstract State 
which has a right to representation in Congress. But how can there be a 
right to representation when there is nobody to be represented ? All this 
may appear puerile, but the puerility is in the premises as well as in the 
logical deductions ; and the premises are laid down as indisputable consti- 
tutional principles by the eminent jurists who supply ideas for the National 
Union Party. 

The doctrine of the unconditional right of the Rebel States to represen- 
tation being thus a demonstrated absurdity, the only question relates to 
the conditions which Congress proposes to impose. Certainly these con- 
ditions, as embodied in the constitutional amendment which has passed 
both houses by such overwhelming majorities, are the mildest ever exacted 
cf defeated enemies by a victorious nation. There is not a distinctly 
" radical" idea in the whole amendment, — nothing that President Johnson 
has not himself, within a comparatively recent period, stamped with his 
high approbation. Does it ordain universal suffrage? No. Does it ordain 
impartial suffrage ? No. Does it proscribe, disfranchise, or expatriate the 
recent armed enemies of the country, or confiscate their propert}^? No. 
It simply ordains that the national debt shall be paid and the Rebel debt 
repudiated ; that the civil rights of all persons shall be maintained ; that 
Rebels who have added perjury to treason shall be disqualified for oifice ; 
and that the Rebel States shall not have their political power in the Union 
increased by the presence on their soil of persons to whom they deny 
political rights, but that representation shall be based throughout the Re- 
public on voters, and not on population. The pith of the whole amend- 
ment is in the last clause ; and is there anything in that to which reason- 
able objection can be made ? Would it not be a curious result of the war 
against Rebellion, that it should end in conferring on a Rebel voter in 
South Carolina a power equal, in national affairs, to that of two loyal 
voters in New York ? Can any Democrat have the face to assert that the 
South should have, through its disfranchised negro freemen alone, a power 
in the Electoral College and in the national House of Representatives equal 
to that of the States of Ohio and Indiana combined ? 

Yet these conditions, so conciliatory, moderate, lenient, almost timid, 
and which, by the omission of impartial suffrage, fall very far below the 
requirements of the average sentiment of the loyal nation, are still de- 



6 THE JOHNSON PAKTY. 

nounced by the new party of "Union" as the work of furious radicals, bent 
on destroying the rights of the States. Thus Governor James L. Orr, of 
South Carolina, a leading Rebel, pardoned into a Johnsonian Union man, 
implores the people of that region to send delegates to the Philadelphia 
Convention, on the ground that its purpose is to organize "conservative" 
men of all sections and parties, " to drive from power that radical party 
who are daily trampling under foot the Constitution, and fast converting a 
constitutional Republic into a consolidated despotism." The terms to 
which South Carolina is asked to submit, before she can be made the equal 
of Ohio or New York in the Union, are stated to be " too degrading and 
humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for a single instant." When 
we consider that this "radical party" constitutes nearly four-fifths of the 
legal legislature of the nation, that it was the party which saved the 
country from dismemberment while Mr. Orr and his friends were no- 
toriously engaged in " trampling the Constitution under foot," and that the 
man who denounces it owes his forfeited life to its clemency, the astound- 
ing insolence of the impeachment touches the sublime. Here is confessed 
treason inveighing against tiMed loyalty, in the name of the Constitution 
it has violated and the law it has broken I But why does Mr. Orr think 
the terms of South Carolina's restored relations to the Union "too de- 
grading and humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for a single in- 
stant?"- Is it because he wishes to have the Rebel debt paid? Is it be- 
cause he desires to have the Federal debt repudiated ? Is it because be 
thinks it intolerable that a negro should have civil rights ? Is it because 
he resents the idea that breakers of oaths, like himself, should be disquali- 
fied from having another opportunity of forswearing themselves ? Is it 
because he considers that a white Rebel freeman of South Carolina has a 
natural right to exercise double the political power of a white loyal free- 
man of Alassachusetts ? He must return an affirmative answer to all these 
questions in order to make it out that his State will be degraded and 
humiliated by ratifying the amendment ; and the necessity of the measure 
is therefore proved by the motives known to prompt the attacks of its 
vilifiers. 

The insolence of Mr. Orr is not merely individual, but representative. 
It is the result of Mr. Johnson's attempt "to produce harmony between 
the two sections," by betraying the section to which he owed his election. 
Had it not been for his treachery, there would have been little difficulty in 
settling the terms of peace, so as to avoid all causes for future war ; but, 
from the time he quarrelled with Congress, he has been the great stirrer- 
up of disaffection at the South, and the virtual leader of the Southern re- 
actionary party. Every man at the South who was prominent in the 
Rebellion, every man at the North who was prominent in aiding the Re- 
bellion, is now openly or covertly his partisan, and by fawning on him 
earns the right to defame the representatives of the people by whom the 
Rebellion was put down. Among traitors and Copperheads the fear of 
punishment has been succeeded by the hope of revenge ; elation is on faces 
which the downfall of Richmond overcast ; and a return to the old times, 
when a united South ruled the country by means of a divided North, is 



THE JOHNSON PARTY. 7 

eoufidently exjiected by the whole crew of political bullies and political 
Evcophants whose profit is in the abaseincut of the nation. It is even 
said that, if the majority of the " Rump " Congress cannot oe overcome by 
fair means, it will be by foul ; and there are noisy partisans of the Presi- 
dent who assert that he has in him a Cromwellian capacity for dealing 
with legislative assemblies whose notions of the public good clash with 
his own. In short, we are promised, on the assembling of the next Con- 
gress, a coup (Velat. 

Garret Davis, of Kentucky, was, we believe, the first to announce this 
executive remedy for the " radical " disease of the state, and it has since 
been often prescribed by Democratic politicians as a sovereign panacea. 
General McClernand, indeed, proposed a scheme, simpler even than that 
of executive recognition, by which the Southern Senators and Pvepre- 
sentatives might effect a lodgment in Congress. They should, accord- 
ing to him, have gone to Washington, entered the halls of legislation, 
and proceeded to occupy their seats, "peaceably if they could, forcibly 
if they must;" but the record of General McClernand, as a military man, 
was not such as to give to his advice on a question of carrying positions by 
assault, a high degree of authority, and, there being some natural hesita- 
tion in following his counsel, the golden opportunity was lost. Mr. Mont- 
gomery Blair, who professes his willingness to act with any men, " Rebels 
or any one else," to put down the radicals, is never weary of talking to 
conservative conventions of "two Presidents and two Congresses." There 
can be no doubt that the project of a coup (fetat has become dangerously 
familiar to the "conservative" mind, and that the eminent legal gentlemen 
of the North who are publishing opinions affirming the right of the excluded 
Southern representatives to their seats are playing into the hands of the 
desperate gang of unscrupulous politicians who are determined to have 
the right established by force. It is computed that the gain, in 'the ap- 
proaching elections, of twenty-five districts now represented by Union 
Republicans, will give the Johnson party, in the next Congress, a majority 
of the House of Representatives, should the Southern delegations l>e 
counted ; and it is proposed that the Johnson members legally entitled to 
seats should combine with the Southern pretenders to seats, organize as 
the House of Representatives of the United States, and apply to the 
President for recognition. Should the President comply, he would be im- 
peached by an unrecognized House before an "incomplete" Senate, and, if 
convicted, would deny the validity of the proceeding. The result would 
be civil wai*, in which the name of the Federal government would be on 
the side of the revolutionists. Such is the programme which is freely dis- 
cussed by partisans of the President, considered to be high in his favor ; 
and the scheme, it is contended, is the logical result of the position he has 
assumed as to the rights of the excluded States to representation. It is 
certain that the present Congress is as much the Congress of the United 
States as he is the President of the United States ; but it is well known 
that he considers himself to represent the whole country, while he thinks 
that Congress only represents a portion of it ; and he has in his character 
just that combination of qualities, and is placed in just those anomalous 



8 THE JOHNSON PARTY. 

circumstances, which lead men to the commission of great political crimes. 
The mere hint of the possibility of his attempting a coup d^etat is received 
by some Republicans with a look of incredulous surprise ; yet what has 
his administration been to such persons but a succession of surprises ? 

But whatever view may be taken of the President's designs, there can 
be no doubt that the safety, peace, interest, and honor of the country 
depend on the success of the Union Republicans in the approaching elec- 
tions. The loyal nation must see to it that the Fortieth Congress shall be 
as competent to override executive vetoes as the Thirty-Ninth, and be 
equally removed from the peril of being expelled for one more in harmony 
with Executive ideas. The same earnestness, energy, patriotism, and 
intelligence which gave success to the war, must now be exerted to reap 
its fruits and prevent its recurrence. The only danger is, that, in some 
representative districts, the people may be swindled by plausibilities and 
respectabilities ; for when in political contests, any great villany is contem- 
plated, thei'e are always found some eminently respectable men, with a 
fixed capital of certain eminently conservative phrases, innocently ready 
to furnish the wolves of politics with abundant supplies of sheep's clothing. 
These dignilied dupes are more than usually active at the present time ; 
and the gravity of their speech is as edifying as its emptiness. Immersed 
in words, and with no clear perception of things, they mistake conspiracy 
for conservatism. Their pet horror is the term "radical"; their ideal of 
heroic patriotism, the spectacle of a great nation which allows itself to be 
ruined with decorum, and dies rather than commit the slightest breach of 
constitutional etiquette. This insensibility to facts and blindness to the 
tendency of events, they call wisdom and moderation. Behind these 
political dummies are the real forces of the Johnson party, men of insolent 
spirit, resolute will, embittered temper, and unscrupulous purpose, who 
clearly know what they are after, and will hesitate at no "informality" in 
the attempt to obtain it. To give these persons political power will be to 
surrender the results of the war, by placing the government practically in 
the hands of those against whom the war was waged. No smooth words 
about "the equality of the States," "the necessity of conciliation," "the 
wickedness of sectional conflicts," will alter the fact, that, in refusing to 
support Congress, the people would set a reward on treachery and place 
a bounty on treason. "The South," says a Mr. Hill, of Georgia, in a 
letter favoring the Philadelphia Convention, "sought to save the Con- 
stitution out of the Union. She failed. Let her now bring her diminished 
and shattered, but united and earnest counsels and energies to save the 
Constitution in the Union." The sort of Constitution the South sought 
to save by warring against the government is the Constitution which she 
now proposes to save by administering it ! Is this the tone of pardoned and 
penitent treason ? Is this the spirit to build up a " ISTational Union Party " ? 
No ; but it is the tone and spirit now fashionable in the defeated Rebel 
States, and will not be changed until the autumn elections shall have 
proved that they have as little to expect from the next Congress as from 
the present, and that they must give securities for their future conduct 
before they can be relieved from the penalties incurred by their past. 



\ 



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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



013 785 631 1 » 



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pH8.5 

Mill Run F3-1955 



